Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (2 page)

Looking back, revolution was in the air. The domino effect of the major global economic meltdown that began in 2007 quickly turned into a series of food shocks—sudden, dramatic price increases for certain foods or the complete loss of supply of them—in various countries almost simultaneously. Though caused by years of the financial industry's overreaching in the big industrialized countries of the United States and the United Kingdom, the immediate consequence of the global credit crisis played out more concretely in the streets and in the food markets of Egypt, Yemen, Russia, and India. The prices of basic food staples like rice, wheat, and potatoes soared, causing riots. Soon afterward, Mexico experienced
its own surge in the cost of corn, leading to a series of “tortilla riots.”
²
Italy endured a “pasta strike” when outraged consumers refused to accept the 20 percent cost increase of pasta.
³
Argentineans demanded that their government stabilize the price of tomatoes as they shot out of reach of ordinary citizens.
⁴
These staples, which by now were commodities bought and sold on the open world market, like anything else, were subject to the price volatility of a nervous global market. Furthermore, because of the fact that staple products like rice, corn, and wheat were now considered inputs in the burgeoning biofuels industry, the price of food staples was now tied to the cost of fossil fuels.

Industrial food, for all its decades of bluster about feeding the world's poor, eliminating starvation, and ending global hunger, simply supersized the problems. By squeezing out record crop yields, we exhausted and eroded the soil as we increased our planet's population, which tipped over into seven billion in 2011 and is projected to be nine billion by 2045.
⁵

The problem is that in that time, we've failed to solve the inequality problems of who overeats and who is malnourished. Now we are hearing those same arguments from those who tout genetically modified foods and crops as the solution to world hunger. They say genetic modification is necessary to feed the planet, and they use the same logic to push their for-profit patented foods, not just in selected “needy” countries but globally as well.

Closer to home, hunger soared as the middle class became the working poor, and the poor became destitute.

Food security, as defined in 1996 at the United Nations’ World Food Summit, exists “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”
⁶
This often refers to both a physical and an economic ability to obtain good food. When one or both of these conditions are not met, individuals, groups of people, and entire nations can be said to be food insecure.

In 2008 and 2009, 50.2 million Americans were food insecure—that
is, they didn't know where their next meal was coming from on any given day.
⁷
This figure included the 17.2 million children in those households.
⁸
The US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, the group that has tracked food-security issues in the United States since 1995, reported that these levels were the “highest percentage observed since nationally representative food-security surveys began in 1995.”
⁹
The report also noted that “food insecurity was more common in large cities than in rural areas and in suburbs and other outlying areas around large cities.”
¹⁰
There was a rise in food deserts, areas in cities devoid of markets and grocery stores, where people have little or no access to healthy, nutritious, fresh, whole foods because grocery stores moved out to the suburbs, where more affluent customers had also moved. Low-income communities in the city centers were left with fast-food outlets and convenience stores as their only options. Without easily accessible and affordable transportation options—for the past decade, the average distance Americans must travel between their home and the closest grocery store is six miles—good food ended up out of reach physically as well as economically. (Eventually, people who live in these food deserts forget or fail to learn how to recognize whole foods and how to prepare a meal from scratch, leading to a kind of food illiteracy.)

Clearly, the urban-agriculture movement wasn't happening in a vacuum. The more I learned about the desperate situation that we were in as industrial consumers, the more I grew to appreciate how revolutionary, subversive, and necessary the open-source, chaotic, decentralized nature of the urban-agriculture revolution seemed. If the pundits’ predictions of a catastrophic failure of a century-long experiment in an industrialized and, more recently, globalized food system ever came to pass, community gardens, urban chickens, public orchards, urban beekeeping, commercial urban farms, open sharing of knowledge, and even the science fiction-like promise of vertical farms were poised to coalesce into a new urban food revolution. A shorter food chain, as any economist would tell you, was the future.

Once I started following the thread of urban agriculture, it was all I could do to keep up. I was bombarded with e-mail updates from my friends with news about their urban chickens, complete with glamour photos of laying hens and boasts about egg counts. My friend Patty Milligan reported that she couldn't keep up with requests for her beginner urban beekeeper courses, and Jeremy, my thirteen-year-old neighbor, finally convinced his parents that his fascination with bees and honey wasn't just a phase. (His two wooden beekeeping hive boxes, which he skillfully hand-painted with cartoon bees and flowers, are thriving and producing lavender and mint-scented urban honey.) And I watched how, within a few short years, it seemed as if the social event of the year—for urban hipsters, community activists, and baby boomers alike—had become the springtime seed exchange in community leagues all over North America.

As I decided to write a book about this flurry of activity in urban agriculture, I knew I had to include a wider perspective beyond my own city.

Heading out on the road, I traveled to cities at the forefront of taking back their food systems and adapting them to an urban environment. I sought out the forward-thinking pioneers who had been working in the urban-agriculture movement, as well as the fresh-faced newcomers oozing enthusiasm.

I spent time in well-known hotspots of urban agriculture in North America, such as Vancouver, British Columbia, where 42 percent of households grow food in their yards at home,
¹¹
and Toronto, Ontario, where 40 percent live in households that produce some of their own food.
¹²
I was fascinated by the game-changing projects taking root in unlikely places like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago. I ventured as far away as I could, to London where I met Mark Ridsdill Smith, who grows thousands of dollars worth of fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs on his six-by-nine-foot balcony and in a few window boxes of his flat. In turn, he introduced me to Azul-Valérie Thomé, whose Food from the Sky is
essentially a farm on the rooftop of a grocery store, situated so that vegetables can be picked, packed, and purchased within just a few hours from dirt to display cooler. I obsessed over the burgeoning urban wine movement in London, only to find that urban vineyards were everywhere in Paris (132 in the greater Paris region) and as far away as Vienna (1,700 acres [687 hectares] under vine within the city limits). I also added to my collection of urban beekeeping success stories when I found a thriving urban beekeeping community in Paris helped along by a decade-long ban on chemical pesticide use in the city limits.

And then I returned, once again, to Cuba, which still leads the global pack in permaculture food production—ecosystems modeled on the ones found in nature with high levels of biodiversity—a type of managed, edible wilderness that represents the latest thinking on a post-agricultural food system. No wonder Cuba has the world knocking on its doors to learn and exchange knowledge.

Revolutions happen for a reason, and I do my best to explain this in
chapters 1
through
5
. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and yet, paradoxically, they are undernourished at the same time. Hunger is a growing problem not just in faraway places but right in our hometowns, with demands on the services of food banks and other hunger-relief programs reportedly increasing by double digits annually. Our cities are just microcosms of our entire planet—one billion people are overfed while another billion people go to bed hungry every night—where we have more than enough food, but those in need get too little or the wrong kind of food. Finally, our food crisis has created a health crisis that is threatening to overwhelm the budgets of every industrialized nation's government.

We need to understand how we got to the point where our food system has become so unhealthy, so unfair, so environmentally destructive, and has become a catastrophic failure. And just as the optimists and deniers kept repeating that banks were “too big to fail,” our globalized, industrial food system has seemed to reach that point as well. If it's toppling
under its own greed and mismanagement, it is because we allowed it to get too big to feed us properly. If we can no longer outwit the cold, hard realities of peak oil, peak water, and peak soil, we're in for one hell of a market correction. As we move into an uncertain economic future, food security will continue to erode in many communities that are already struggling.

That is why I have devoted the bulk of this book to telling the stories of people keeping a few chickens in their backyards (sometimes illegally, as in Toronto), farms being planted high on rooftops in the concrete jungles of cities (New York City and London), public orchard projects in unexpected places (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), community gardens being used as tools of social change (Vancouver's Intercultural Community Gardens project), and an entire country that has embraced urban agriculture as the cornerstone of its national food system (Cuba). The bulk of this book,
chapters 6
through
14
, therefore, is about the people, cities, and urban gardens and farms that are the seeds of change in this new urban food revolution.

In the five years from when this book began to take shape to its publication, the idea of food production within urban landscapes has gone from a fringe concern of a few academics, green thumbs, and counterculture gadflies to a real hands-in-the-dirt mainstream, social, environmental, and economic revolution.

My travels, interviews, and discoveries did not always follow a linear path. But I've done my best to recount them in a way that makes geographic sense or at least thematic sense. If I meander and weave somewhat in the telling of these stories, that's just the gardener in me. You'll find very few straight rows in my garden.

Up to the very moment this book went to print, I squeezed ever-more stories onto the pages out of sheer admiration for ground-breaking projects that appeared daily on my radar. The London Olympic Games in the summer of 2012 will be the first major sporting event with a food policy in place, specifically the sourcing of food from the projected 2,012 urban
food gardens in the city. The race is on to build the world's first vertical farm, a layered mixed farm—offering fish, fruit, veggies, and herbs—in the middle of a city. And plans for futuristic “agro-parks,” which are spooky factory farms with a tourism component, continue to emerge from China, though it's unclear who exactly will build these and when.

The momentum behind urban agriculture as it stands in 2012 leaves me hopeful that this is a major turning point for how we design and use our urban spaces, how we feed ourselves, and how we treat our food producers and our planet. I am more convinced now than ever before that this is more than just a flash-in-the-pan green trend, and that the movement is showing no signs of slowing. As Paul Hughes, the highly quotable local foods and urban chicken activist in Calgary, Alberta, likes to remind people: “This is just the tip of the iceberg lettuce.”

T
HE
S
UPERMARKET

N
o matter how philosophically “locavore” (trying to source only locally grown and raised food), or how pro-farmers’ markets I am, I still find myself pushing a shopping cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket a couple times a week.

I'm remarkably typical, as it turns out. According to the Food Marketing Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based grocery retail association representing three-quarters of all retail grocery sales in the United States, the average supermarket shopper makes 1.7 trips to the supermarket per week.
¹

First of all, supermarkets are undeniably convenient. They are generally open seven days a week, and some chains and locations stay open twenty-four hours a day. I know what's available even before I get there, and most of the food is cheap. That said, if I'm willing to splurge a bit, I
can also get strawberries in January. No wonder this is how the majority of us get our groceries.

The Rise of the Supermarket

For such a monopolistic hold on our food dollars, you'd think that supermarkets had been around since the dawn of time. It's difficult for us to conceive of how it could be otherwise, so it's shocking to think that they've been around for barely four generations. Academic, food-justice activist, and writer Raj Patel points out in his book
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System
, “[S]upermarkets are patented inventions, and like all innovations, they responded to a specific need at the time and place of their conception.”
²

At the turn of the twentieth century, the industrialized nations—and the United States in particular—got very good at producing things, including food. With tractors, combines, and other mechanized farming equipment rather than plow-horses and human labor as the limiting factor of their workday, farmers could clear, plant, and harvest a much larger area, working bigger farms than ever before. They specialized to maximize the usefulness of their equipment and turned from being producers of a wide variety of crops and livestock on a farm (mixed farming) to specializing in as little as one single grain, pulse, or oilseed (monocrop farms). Readily available chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and other chemical treatments to the soil enabled single-crop plantings, which otherwise would exhaust the soil within a few harvests, just as antibiotics allowed concentrated feedlots that would otherwise render livestock sick and unsuitable for slaughter and sale. Farms essentially became factories that specialized in the efficient production of a narrow range of products—but in large quantities at a low unit price.

And just as industrial processes enabled industrial agriculture, industrial agriculture produced industrial food, even more so when food manufacturers began to rely on a narrow selection of raw ingredients
that could be endlessly recombined into packaged and prepared items with a long shelf life.

Food production became so efficient at the end of the industrial food chain that scarcity quickly became overproduction. As with other retail goods, it was noticed that dropping the price encouraged people to buy up the surplus, even when it wasn't really needed. (Just like when commodity crops overproduce, the emphasis turns not to reducing production but to increasing consumption.)

Yet to
really
increase consumption, food retailers needed to invent the modern self-service grocery store, which capitalized on both the new concept of a self-service model paired with new, cheap, industrially produced food to set the wheels in motion for the weapons of mass consumption that we North Americans have become.

Though it seems almost ridiculous to contemplate, acquiring groceries in the past meant that you'd give a shopkeeper a list of items and quantities you wished to purchase. (It's important to keep in mind that the general store was mainly a dry-goods store with a few other items like bananas, citrus, and maybe raisins available. Fresh produce was bought at a farmers’ market-style central market. And fresh meat came from the butcher shops or from butchers’ stalls at the city market.) The shopkeeper would then assemble your grocery order for you and hand it across the counter once you had paid. Or, the tally was added to your store account if you were in good standing, credit-wise, with the shop owner. Most items were fetched from back rooms. A shopkeeper or clerk might suggest you try a new product that just came in, but impulse buying was not the norm. Getting groceries in those days also meant a number of stops at different specialty stores.

In 1914, brothers Albert and Hugh Gerrard had an entrepreneurial idea to combat the steep rise in grocery prices due to the First World War. They came up with the concept of cutting overhead by letting customers choose their own groceries themselves, right off the shelves. To help people find the items they were looking for on their own—a radical
new idea that was sure to cause no end of confusion—the Gerrards decided to assist customers by stocking the food items alphabetically. They called their California-based stores the Alpha Beta.

Another grocer, Clarence Saunders, had a similar idea, but he thought it through a bit more. In 1916, Saunders opened his first self-service King Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Memphis, Tennessee. This new Piggly Wiggly retail model had customers entering the grocery floor via turnstiles and carrying a shopping basket as they were set on a course that snaked up and down each aisle, with a single direction of traffic flow, until the customer reached the checkout and was released back out through an exit turnstile just past the checkout register.

(While we are allowed to roam more freely in today's supermarket, the basic mazelike design is still how most grocery stores are designed, with the added retail trick of placing staple items at the far reaches of the store, forcing us to cover as much geography and to pass as many higher-profit products as possible. Except for a few items such as cars, cosmetics, and perfume, the self-service retail model dominates most consumer goods shopping experiences.)

Saunders, not the Gerrards, was the first to file his idea at the patent office. In 1917, he received US Patent 1,242,872 for his concept for the “Self-Serving Store.” In less than a decade, 1,200 Piggly Wiggly stores opened across the United States.
³
By 1932, there were 2,660 stores.
⁴

Saunders also came up with the idea for the self-service checkout to fully automate the grocery experience in 1937. Only a few Keedoozle—an awkward combination of “key does all”—food stores were built, and it was clear that the automated vending technology just wasn't where it needed to be. The self-serve checkout, as anyone who shops at a supermarket now knows, is finally a reality in the retail landscape, fifty years after Saunders's failed prototype stores. I'm amazed at how unconcerned we seem to be that checkout clerks, the only real human interaction left for the consumer in the industrial food chain, are being phased out. You don't see the farmers, the fishermen, the ranchers, or the fruit growers who produce your food. Soon,
we will no longer see people who swipe it past the barcode scanner and process our payment. (For now, I remain defiant and queue up with the rest of the holdouts at the last few human-operated supermarket checkouts.)

Within a few generations, we have unquestioningly accepted the industrial food system—and the supermarket model serving as its retail outlet—that is concerned merely with lowering the unit costs of the food in question. To say that this is the dominant model is stating the obvious, given the fact that the industrial food system now provides us with 99 percent of the food we eat in North America.
⁵
In return for our loyalty to this model, we get 38,718 different food items to choose from in an average grocery store.
⁶
There are seventeen thousand new hopefuls—new food products—launched into this grocery landscape every year. And talk about cheap! We Americans devote less of our income to purchasing food than any other nation, around 9 percent on average, which is less than what we spend for our transportation needs.
⁷

So what's the downside?

T
HE
I
LLUSION OF
C
HOICE

Within the grocery store, we have the illusion of choice. Forty thousand items sounds like a lot of choice, but it's nothing compared to nature's inventory. The United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that in the twentieth century, 75 percent of the biological diversity of our foods has been lost as a result of industrialized agriculture. Other sources claim that we've lost up to 90 percent of our global food biodiversity.
⁸
The variety of food plants such as the different types of carrots, beans, or lettuces being grown; the genetic diversity of aquatic food stocks; the variety in breeds of our livestock animals; and the total biological diversity of the food that we draw on has been drastically reduced in our lifetime. Rather than having fewer food choices available than we do now, our grandparents actually had more.

Why? Diversity is the enemy of mechanization, so industrial agriculture values consistency, uniformity, and durability for long-distance transport, a quality like taste doesn't enter into the matter. Imagine what we have lost in the flavor pantheon that existed just a few generations ago. And since then, we've lost a full 97 percent of the varieties of our fruits and vegetables, thanks to the unnatural selection of the industrial food system.
⁹
We're losing about 2 percent of the genetic diversity of the world's crops per year.
¹⁰
We'd better get to learn to like a smaller and smaller selection of foods. Only 150 different food-plant species are grown on a large commercial agricultural scale in the world.
¹¹
Despite the fact that farmers have domesticated over five thousand plant species, the industrial food chain uses a mere 3 percent of them.
¹²

For example, there are hundreds of varieties of apples in North America. They come in different sizes, shapes, and colors. They all have slightly different coloring, textures, and flavors. Some store well; others don't. Some are best for baking; others are best for drying. Some make great apple juice; others make excellent cider. Some ripen on the trees in June; others must hang until October. Now
that
is choice.

Sadly, we don't get these choices at the grocery store. Last time I looked there were Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Spartans, Fujis, and maybe Pink Lady
^®
apples, if we were lucky. All are meant for eating raw, and they are all chosen for their ability to be picked while bullet-hard to ship without bruising and to store for months. There's nothing there for me if I want to make my own apple juice or bake a really good pie.

The same goes for tomatoes. Of the hundreds of types and shapes that exist, we're allowed only the ones that are tough enough to endure the industrial food chain.
¹³
If you want to taste a tomato picked only when it was ripe, you are out of luck at the supermarket. And the choice of these apples and tomatoes is alarmingly consistent throughout the calendar year. This uniformity of choice is what is known as global summertime: when grocery supply lines reach all the way around the globe, it's always summer somewhere. The produce selection in January is
pretty damn similar to the produce selection in June, yet it shouldn't be. Broccoli actually is a seasonal product. Peppers are too. So are strawberries, apples, and tomatoes. You'd just never know it from the inside of a grocery store.

Moreover, the choices that we are presented with on the shelves or in the cooler aren't often true choices. We can choose between brands of eggs, but when a salmonella contamination scare on two Iowa farms in August 2010 resulted in a nationwide recall of a half billion eggs, dozens of different brand names of eggs were affected. Why? Because five hundred million eggs all originated from one large-scale producer. Sure, they were sold under different brand names, but they all came from the same huge corporate farm. If that's not sobering enough, consider that there are a mere five corporations behind 90 percent of the US food supply.
¹⁴

And outside the supermarket, the illusion continues. We can choose between major chains, but in the end, we have very little choice of how we get our food other than via a supermarket. Choosing between Costco and Walmart is simply the choice between Coke
^®
and Pepsi
^®
. It's essentially the same stuff on the inside.

N
INE
M
EALS FROM
A
NARCHY

A topic discussed in food-security circles—those groups of people who track food reserves that exist in a city or a country at any given time—that gets surprisingly little coverage in the general discussions about food is the estimate that cities nowadays have a mere three days’ worth of food at any given time to feed their populations.